The Emotional Ape

Part of the problem is that I agree with everyone. Maybe agree isn't exactly the right word..its more like 'assume as a starting point that you have your opinion and I have mine and while they may never coincide, I don't think they need to'. A direct consequence of this is that I won't try and dissuade you.

It becomes problematic in, say, a romantic setting where the intensity of disagreement is seen as a reliable guage for the intensity of feeling: as angry as I get with you is roughly proportionate to how much I love you. If you don't fight for me, you don't care about me.

Now, being allergic to all forms of conflict (at least, within relationships), this has been a difficult concept for me to grasp. And once I grasped it, it became difficult for me to accept. And once acceptance set in, it was difficult for me to implement. Which makes me seem stoic, under-whelming and half-hearted. Which causes people to think I don't care about them.

Well, I care. And I believe that life has a natural flow that you shouldn't force, I say shouldn't, because that would be futile. Opportunities come and relationships go and the ones that are meant to be, will stick. And if someone no longer wants their fate intertwined with yours, well who are you to say they're not right?

As you get older, you become selfish. More selfish, I should say. Opportunity after wasted opportunity accumulate like laundry, weighing down on your ever-worrying mind, causing you to doubt your lack of fight and question your laissez-faire attitude towards the conveyor belt of circumstances that life has sent your way. The luxury of letting people go, unpersuaded, becomes harder to accept as more and more people depart from your life and less and less proof of, shall we say, that a natural order governs the world we live in.

I guess you could call this a loss of faith. And the remarkable thing is that I see the intellectual need for faith, that gaping chasm between the molehill of things we can explain and the mountain of things we have no clue about. I understand its importance, its relevance despite years of observing the failures of religion and hours of reading Sam Elliot, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I see it in my head but I can't get my heart to buy into it. My passion, if you will, which we've already established isn't the strongest furnace around.

Yes, I'm an emotional person. How I feel is infinitely more important to me than what I think and consequently, how other people feel is important to me as well. Which is why whether I think they're making a mistake is irrelevant compared to trying to get them to change their feelings. Feelings are precious to me.

Right now, I feel like a noose is being tightened around my neck.

I've never had the greatest faith in time's ability to move forward. I wake up on a Saturday and cannot conceive how I'll make it to Sunday. I leave New York in less than a month and I can't fathom how I'll survive four weeks with four interminable weekends attached to them. I sit at my desk at 9am and wonder how on earth I ever made it through a working day before. I go to bed at night and...insomnia.

Ok, so I smoke more weed than I should, drink more wine alone than is socially acceptable and have been known to pop a pill or two, when they've been available. The truth is, they're nowhere near enough. If it were up to me, I'd be pissed at night and drugged up during the day or vice versa. I just can't bear this dreadful stillness of time and purpose. I'm in New York and its not where I think I need to be, so why even bother?

Don't answer that. Rhetorical. I know, I know, the value of every moment, who knows how long we've got on this earth, make the most of every waking minute.

See? I know this in my head. I just can't feel it.